Did the Odyssey really happen? The truth of poetry lies in weather
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007 | 2026-04-03
Now, goddess Child of Zeus tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning… We are once again looking for the beginning, but not of a model. Instead, we're looking at ancient weather observations in Homer's Odyssey — perhaps one of the greatest weather texts ever written.
We examine a paper that reconstructs the storm that shipwrecked Odysseus, exploring how modeling past weather relates to future forecasting and what it means to validate a 2,800-year-old poem as archival meteorological observation.
Paper
- Meteorological Assessment of Homer's Odyssey, Cerveny, 1993
Chapters
- 00:05:22 - A lil refresher of what went down in the book
- 00:13:16 - Paper time! Intro to reconstructing ancient weather
- 00:20:09 - Day-by-day on the Mediterranean sea
- 00:36:45 - Actually NOT reconstructing the weather, but validating the Odyssey's accuracy
- 00:41:52 - Why you, weather person, should read the classics
Recommended reading
- The Odyssey by Homer (Translated by Emily Wilson)
- Works & Days by Hesiod (Translated by A. E. Stallings)
- The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin